The Road of Life
Sukhumvit Road stretches like an artery through Bangkok’s restless heart, pumping life, commerce, and vice through its endless sprawl. Past gilding shopping malls, alongside through some of the best value for money business hotels, carved out under one of the busiest BTS lines.
It sells everything. With enough baht in your pocket you can feast like a king on street food or 5 start French restaurants. You can buy fake Rolexes, fake Ray-Bans, fake friendships. From late afternoon street vendors will display illegal vapes and sex toys for sale - including an intriguing number of strap on appendages.
The road of life, a home for thousands who sell what they must to survive. The street food vendors, the tuk-tuk drivers, the tailor shops promising the best suit in town, all of them scrambling for their daily piece of the trade. And then, as night falls, another kind of commerce takes over, slipping into neon and shadows. If you’re desperate enough, you can buy love - or something close to it - it’s the market of desire.
A left turn off Sukhumvit, I find myself in a narrow sidestreet clearly marked by a flashing neon reading “Soi Cowboy”. It’s a spectacle, a carnival of cheap drinks and expensive regrets in an avenue of 20 or so “clubs”. Women stand outside in clusters, draped in tight dresses and exhausted fake smiles, pulling men into their lair.
Inside, the air is thick with cigarette smoke and bad cologne. Some of the girls are laughing, a little too forced, their eyes darting to new customers that come in, estimating their net worth in real time. The men are from everywhere - Europe, Australia, the US - hypnotised businessmen, wide-eyed first-timers, and seasoned (and generally retired) regulars who’ve made a ritual of it.
A short walk up to Nana Plaza, and the vibe concentrates. Here the bars are stacked on top of each other, three floors of flesh for sale. A courtyard prison of neon. Here, men walk inside with the same certainty as a shopper at a supermarket. The difference is that these are people on display, not products. Girls sit on laps, laughing at jokes that aren’t funny, tolerating hands that linger too long, counting down arbitrary minutes till their customers need to buy them a new “drink”. You see the old men with young girls - multiple even. It’s exactly as bad as you think, probably worse.
But the scale of it! Bangkok is just the start, there’s also Pattaya—where entire districts exist solely for this trade, where European retirees navigate their scooters past streets lined with bars that promise “happy hours” or “cheap massage” with an unspoken extra. Then there’s Patong in Phuket, where beach views and five-star resorts exist side by side with a thriving industry of rented intimacy.
It’s massive, sprawling, and deeply entrenched. There is a concept of “tham boon” (making merit). Many sex workers donate money to temples, and in some cases, this is transaction can balance out their karma and buy social tolerance. A business that feeds families and swallows souls. Estimates put it with over 200,000 workers contributing $4.3B annually to the economy, ~3% of the countries GDP. There’s no moralising it. It’s huge and entrenched, it just is?
Many of these women send money home to villages far from Bangkok, supporting parents, siblings, children. Some are here by choice, others by circumstance, and some by force - trapped in an economy that offers few ways out.
And then there are the men. Not all of them villains, but enough of them predators. They come looking for something, sometimes just an escape, sometimes something darker. You see it in their eyes, the way they look at these women, not as people but as transactions, a spirited negotiation over a few dollars worth of Baht. They tell themselves stories—that it’s just fun, that it’s normal here, that they’re supporting livelihoods.
It’s a sad place. A place where loneliness is bought and sold by the hour. A place where desperation meets demand, where both parties pretend it’s what they wanted all along. I wonder if it will ever change.